Tomboy Notes
Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application for Linux, Windows, Macs and Unix. It allows you to quickly create individual notes and then add them to topical notebooks. You can also link between notes much in the way hyperlinks work on webpages.
I’ve been using Tomboy a lot on various computers at home and work. The main problem with Tomboy is there was no way to synchronize the notes between machines. I was on Ars Technica recently and came across a project called ‘Snowy’. According to the developer: “Snowy is Tomboy’s best friend on the web. Snowy is an online service that allows you to view, edit and share the notes you create in Tomboy on your desktop computer.” Snowy is not quite ready for use by your average user yet but it is a promising project.
Another tool that adds functionality to Tomboy is the Tomfox addon to Firefox. According to the author: “Tomfox adds a ‘Create Tomboy Note’ option to the right click menu. This lets users send a selected piece of text to a Tomboy note directly.” This is a helpful tool if your memory is as wonderful as mine. If you’re always wishing you jotted down a quick note or can’t find your way back to some website this is an extension for you.
Since I use Ubuntu 9.04 more than half of the time I setup Tomboy to start automatically every time I load that OS. To do this I went to System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications. This gives you a GUI tool to determine what programs start when Ubuntu loads. Since Tomboy notes is not part of the list I clicked on the “add” button. In the name field I simply wrote: “Tomboy Notes” and in the “Command” field I wrote: “tomboy”. Now click on the “add” button and you are done.
